Warsaw (12 page)

"Now, it seems, we have a contest on our hands. Excuse
me while I take off my jacket. I really must invite you - or order you if needs
be - to the next party I arrange. You should by rights be an officer by now
anyway Thomas, no? You are sufficiently intelligent and are from the right
stock. Indeed I'm a little bewildered and disappointed that you haven't chosen
to rise through the ranks - although I fear you may be too old to start
now."

Before Thomas owned a chance to answer one of the
Lieutenant's entourage re-appeared and informed him that he had received an urgent
phone call. "Can it not wait?" Christian reluctantly replied, but the
soldier dutifully responded that it couldn't.

"Unfortunately I'm going to have to go. Hopefully we'll
be able to have a re-match, or finish this game off some time in the
future."

"I'll be happy to make a note of the pieces if you
like?"

When the Lieutenant and his SS subordinate left the room a
couple of men from Thomas' platoon approached their Corporal.

"You must have been about to beat him Thomas. I reckon
that the sly taking off of his jacket was a signal, the cheating bastard. As
soon as he done it one of his lap-dogs woke up and darted over to you from his
look-out over near the door."

"It's okay, it's only a game" Thomas wryly
replied, more uncertain of the conviction (especially on Kleist's part) than
his tone might have suggested.
  

10.

"It could be a blessing in disguise that he pulled that
stunt and you didn't get to beat him. He's a nasty piece of work that one. I've
seen them before. He actually believes in what he's doing - and he also does it
because he enjoys it. He's a fanatic," Oscar expressed to his Corporal
over a cup of hot weak tea. "You don't want to make an enemy of him. He
could do you just for talking to that Jewish girlfriend you see on the sly. If
you really wanted to be clever you should have lost to him. I'm bloody glad you
didn't though."

"How do you know about her? She's not my girlfriend as
well. I'm just someone for her to talk to," Thomas said defensively,
blushing a little.

"Just be careful, that's all I'm saying," the
Private replied with his hands up and palms facing towards his friend, as if to
convey that he wasn't judging him - and don't shoot the messenger.

"Yes - Mum. I still don't know exactly why I had the
pleasure of his company this afternoon though."

"I thought you said something about him wanting to
recruit young Klos to his staff."

"He did seem keen on the idea."

"I think the lad could do with a clip round the ear now
or then, but I wouldn't wish a transfer on him to the Russian Front - which'll
probably happen to him if he doesn't get a desk job of some sort or join the
SS. It'll probably happen to all of us the way things are going there."

"I know, that's why I'll have a word with him about
taking the position. But that can wait till the morning. I'm going to bed. Good
night."

Thomas drained the cup - and then shook his head in minor
revulsion at what he had just poured down his gullet. He walked behind a couple
of giant grey sheets in the corner of the room which acted as walls to his
quarters. His bed consisted of a worn mattress and a couple of blankets. His
kit bag, stuffed with an old uniform, served as a pillow. A dusty black and
white picture in a frame of his wife and child was propped up next to it. A
foot high stack of books leaned against the wall, a Bible half-way up the
column.

Abendroth chided himself but thought of Jessica, not Maria.
He gazed upon the photographs that the girl had given to him. Jessica said that
should she suddenly disappear she wanted the photos to remind the Corporal of
her - and also it brought her comfort to know that, if a picture of her and her
family survived, they could not totally be erased from History. So too, whilst
not saying so, Jessica wanted to give the Corporal a photograph of her before
the war, to impress upon him how attractive she once was - and could be again.

The colour photograph might've been taken by an old
boyfriend such was the intimate but flirtatious way in which the subject gazed
directly at the photographer. Jessica had said that she was eighteen when the
picture had been taken. Such was the proliferation of plump, pink blossom upon
the tree in the shot that one would have posited that it was spring, but such
was the girl's honey-skin and lustrous fair hair that Thomas reckoned it must
have been summer when the photograph was taken. Jessica was wearing a lightly
pleated cotton dress, scarlet with white poker dots; the black leather belt
clasped her hour glass figure in such a way as to accentuate her contours. Her
shoulder-length golden hair framed a face that could enslave and inspire in any
age.

The family had changed even more than the captivating
daughter since the time when the photograph of them all was taken. Albeit
appearing to be a holiday snap, with a crystal coastline in the background, the
picture and poses were quite formal. Doctor Rubenstein - stylish linen summer
suit, smiling, patriarchal - stood with a Bromberg hat in his hands, his
barrel-chest thrusting out. His elegant and proud wife consciously posed for
the camera, though she would have denied she had ever done so. The boy, lively
and colourful even in black and white, carried a trowel and bucket for making
sand castles. The impish expression on Kolya's face reminded Thomas of his own
precious son and the soldier briefly put down the picture for a moment or two.
Jessica naturally attracted one's attention in the picture, standing at the
centre between her proud parents. Thomas had an erection beneath his blanket.
Uncomfortable and guilty the middle-aged Corporal turned his inward eye onto
the last figure in the photograph, Betti - Jessica and Kolya's Grandmother. The
innocent and happy expression upon her squinting countenance gave credence to
the argument that old age is a second childhood. Jessica had unwittingly echoed
Duritz, in both tone and phrasing, when she had told Thomas that she was glad
that her Grandmother had passed away before the occupation. The Corporal
recalled the passion and animation in Jessica's aspect when she talked to about
her Grandmother. She was quite a character. In her early twenties Betti would
sometimes dress up as a young man to infiltrate some of the men only clubs in
the district. She was intelligent, eventually becoming a schoolteacher, and
married, for love, a handsome piano tuner. Betti miscarried four times but
eventually had a boy, Saul (who grew up to be diplomat, but chose to fight
defending the city instead of accepting a post abroad) and a girl, Halina.
Funny, generous and, as Betti grew older, a deeply religious woman, Jessica
remarked how people always compared her to her spirited Grandmother. The
confession only fuelled the attentive Corporal's interest in the sweet-faced
old lady in the resonating photograph.

Night rippled across a cotton sky. On a whim, to kill time,
Oscar Hummel decided to polish his boots. Morbidity began to weigh upon his
thoughts again.

Oscar Hummel was born in an impoverished neighbourhood in
Hamburg to an equally impoverished family. Yet they had each other. Mother and
father gave their children love but also, more importantly, they provided them
with the foundations for a good education. The hardy six foot teenager was an
apprentice bricklayer at the time when he was called up to fight in the Great
War. His youthful sense of romantic duty and patriotism blinded him to the
cause and horror of the conflict initially. But Verdun soon tempered his zeal
and educated Oscar in life's golden rules of cynicism and the anti-climax. He
learned that the higher one went up the chain of command, the further they
became removed from the realities of war. Yet the Private, who eventually rose
to the rank of Corporal (by virtue of the deaths of his comrades), served his
country well. He won the Iron Cross leading his platoon into a machine-gun nest
and capturing it. Oscar returned to post-war Germany however not to a hero's
welcome - not that he expected or felt he deserved one - but with a feeling of
bitterness and betrayal in the back of his throat.

Anti-Semitic, but not virulently so, and anti-Communist
Oscar Hummel voted for Hitler and the National Socialists, perhaps as a protest
vote at first. His loyalty towards the Party and the Reich increased however.
Prosperity and a sense of order, nationhood, grew under the Fuhrer. Oscar Hummel
had nothing to fear from the more unseemly aspects of the Party as long as he
kept his head down. He was suitably intelligent to see the propaganda as such,
but was there not a grain of truth in their arguments? The Jews were insular.
They did seem to possess too much power and influence. They thought themselves
better than everyone else. As much as he frowned upon certain episodes of
violence and undemocratic legislation his opinion was "let them
emigrate". Oscar married. Mary Tarnat was a devout Christian and florist.
The woman started off as Oscar's part-time housekeeper - but an affection and
sexual relationship developed between the two middle-aged, lonely people. She
was kind, generous and devoted to the good natured labourer as if she were his mother.
They were happy enough together as husband and wife, happier still when Oscar
began to secretly visit prostitutes and then in turn spoil Mary out of a sense
of guilt. Just before the war Oscar and his wife saved up enough money for him
to go into business for himself, as a landscape gardener. War broke out however
and - although he managed at first to avoid being called up - the veteran was
ordered into the militia and then into the Order Police, where Oscar was duly
posted to Poland and Josefow.

Josefow was a village in Poland, the scene for one of the
first mass executions of Polish Jews during the Second World War. The newly
recruited policeman had already been disturbed by some of the events and
behaviour of Germans as he helped occupy and ‘police’ Poland. He had been there
when an SS commanding officer ordered a house to be burnt down containing a
number of Jewish families. Those that were not burnt alive (Oscar could still
hear their blood-curdling screams in his nightmares afterwards) were shot as
they tried to escape the flames by jumping out of the windows, scorched,
charred. The burning flesh reminded the old soldier of Verdun - but he
concluded how different things had been back then also. But Oscar himself had
stolen food and belongings - and turned a blind eye to his raping comrades -
during the policing of Poland.

Perhaps no one knew beforehand, bar the senior officers, of
the act of genocide that was to take place on the morning of the Josefow
massacre. They could all guess soon enough though. The Jewish inhabitants of
the village were rounded up in the marketplace and then loaded onto trucks and
taken to the forest to be "evacuated". Before the business began the
soldiers in Oscar's battalion were asked if they would like to be dismissed from
the shootings. A handful said yes. Most didn't however, for individual and
conformist reasons. A small piece of training and advice was then given to the
squad- that they should use the bayonets upon their rifles - pressing them
against the cervical vertebrae at the base of the neck to act as a marker for
the shot.

Later that night the unassumingly introspective soldier
asked himself the question was he brave, or a coward, to have stopped and
relieved himself of his duty after his first execution? Dejection. Loathing.
Oscar found it difficult to sleep. His drinking increased. A week after Josefow
he still suffered nightmares. Swallowing his pride, Oscar wrote a letter to a
senior official in the Party - who he had once been a gardener and friend to -
and he arranged to be transferred out of the Order Police and attached to a
small contingent of the regular army who were about to be posted to the newly
established Warsaw ghetto.

After vigorously polishing his boots Oscar read a little
from the book Thomas had lent him - a well thumbed edition of Ernst Junger's
‘Storm Of Steel’ - until his eyelids weighed as heavy as the black mood which
had threatened to undo him. Although feeling sufficiently sleepy the old
Private still took a couple of the pills that he had bought from a medical
orderly, to help prevent him waking up in the middle of the night.

A few years after the war Oscar Hummel tried to understand
and expatiate his experiences in Poland by recalling and writing about them. A
few extracts from his memoirs, which he never published, are recorded below.

"...As a man may see the profile of a beautiful woman
in the street and for a instant be reminded of a teenage sweetheart - and an
appropriate sense of fondness and wonder makes his heart skip a beat - I am
still occasionally haunted by faces in the crowd which look like his. Yet no
airy sense of romance or nostalgia sweeps me off my feet. No. I experience a
debilitating nausea, chills. I all but have a panic attack - perhaps they even
are panic attacks. I find it difficult to regulate my breathing and impossible
to swallow. I feel hot and cold at the same time. I feel the urge to just sob.
Time doesn't heal all wounds.

I sometimes think that I should have stayed with my
battalion in the Order Police. Perhaps if I had remained I would have similarly
become desensitised to the executions and my conscience. I could have been
converted! I had a Corporal during the war who argued that we were
"engineered" into becoming cold-hearted killers. He spoke of how the
SS wanted to depersonalise the killings - the way in which one soldier led one
man off to execute him at Josefow was an over emotional and inefficient method
which the SS learned from and never repeated. So too alcohol was freely
available and imbibed before and during the shootings. "Good"
officers also made several of us shoot at the time into a line of evacuees in
order to lessen the personal responsibility of murder. A sense of competition
became instilled into some officers and units. Quotas had to be fulfilled and
bettered. Where, at Josefow, no one said a word against those men who refused -
eventually such an act became dishonourable and cowardly... Officers perhaps
did not notice the blood on their hands through the ink stains from
continuously writing down their figures in the appropriate boxes. 1,500 people
were murdered at Josefow. I met an old comrade from the battalion a short time
after the war, who served with it throughout their clean-up operation in
Poland. He said that "Josefow was nothing". Was there an element of
boasting in his voice?

But I think that my Corporal, one of the more intelligent
and heroic people I encountered during the war, might have been trying to
defend us too much. Or he might have even just been trying to comfort me. He
would argue that it was not my fault that I had done what I had done, that I
was not freely doing what I was doing. He knew too that rather than men being
moulded, we were unleashed. Inhumanity and humanity are one in the same. Thomas
himself related the scenes and behaviour to a Bacchic orgy: the religious
fanaticism fuelled by intoxication; the wildness, bloodlust, abandonment; the
mistreatment of women. Or we lie to ourselves, don't take responsibility for
our actions, by saying that it was because "orders were orders" that
we did what we did - which translates into the honesty of "it was better
that a Jew got shot rather than me".